Television is the most widely available form of mass audiovisual communications in use today. The basic format of television is relatively mature, consisting primarily of television network-operated transmission stations sending programming signals to passive receivers or “sets.” Media content, in the form of television shows and advertising, are transmitted over specific radio frequencies and program selection is limited to the programming broadcast at any given time.
Cable- and satellite-based television network services offer an alternative to conventional radio frequency-based television programming. Both formats offer superior reception quality and provide an extensive selection of media content by airing a wider range of television channels. Of late, these network services have begun to offer “pay-per-view” programming services. Using set-top boxes, subscribers can purchase time-restricted access to view content made available on controlled television channels. Popular content includes first run movies and sporting events. Although more flexible than conventional television, “pay-per-view” formats only provide access to the additional content aired by the cable or satellite networks at specific show times on standard television sets and are not broadcast via other means.
Recognizing this shortfall, media content providers operating over internetworks, and specifically, the Internet, have begun to offer downloadable media content as an alternative to television broadcast programming. Live media content is aired as streaming media and static, pre-recorded media content is staged on content servers for retrieval and playback by clients on demand. Television, as well as radio, programming is also available. To view media content over an internetwork, users use a Web browser to navigate to the desired media content and then execute a media playback application within the Web browser to download and view the selected shows and other content.
Although more customizable than standard television programming, Internet-based “media-on-demand” (henceforth, simply “media-on-demand”) services suffer from numerous shortcomings. The most apparent shortcoming is a drastic difference in viewing experience. Personal computer displays offer a higher resolution than standard NTSC television sets. This difference negatively affects the appearance of media content. Moreover, Web browser-based media playback applications display media at low resolutions in small viewing windows with low fidelity sound, thereby further degrading the viewing experience.
As well, media-on-demand is network infrastructure-sensitive. Media content is generally downloaded as a series of streamed serialized packets. To improve throughput, the loss of individual packets can be tolerated to a certain degree at the expense of distortion during playback. However, media content delivery is contingent on the continued availability of the content server and is subject to bandwidth and network load constraints. As well, delivery is further limited by the processing capability of each client.
In addition, most media content is subject to copyright and other forms of digital rights protections. However, media content is often staged with little or no privilege or access safeguards. Content is freely available for downloading and viewing without significant copying or distribution protections. Once downloaded, redistribution consequently becomes uncontrollable and infringements virtually impossible to police.
Similarly, media-on-demand further lacks electronic commerce (e-commerce) and electronic business (e-business) support. For example, e-commerce concerns conducting on-line transactions over an internetwork and e-business concerns running a business based on an network-centric business model. However, users generally request media from a content server with minimal interaction. With few exceptions, no transaction processing, order management, or advertising and product targeting take place. Media content is simply downloaded and viewed with potential business opportunities lost.
In the prior art, direct download and media content streaming are the two predominant forms of media content retrieval. Direct download involves the retrieval of media content from a content server en masse. The user browses available data files containing media content and downloads a media content selection in the same way as any other file. This approach is slow and inefficient, as content is unicast from the content server to the requesting client in a one-to-one connection. Furthermore, less bandwidth-capable clients suffer further, as most content servers are architected to service the fastest connections first.
Media content streaming involves the delivery of media content in a series of individual packets at a data rate preferably exceeding the rate of consumption. Individual packets are received in serial order and stored in a temporary buffer until the requesting client has received packets sufficient to enable playback. However, streaming is bandwidth-dependent and also unicast.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to delivering full-function, full-motion media-on-demand in a distributed computing environment. Preferably, such an approach would provide secure reliable content delivery through a hierarchical media service infrastructure.
There is a further need for an approach to serving media content via a distributed network framework incorporating fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing. Preferably, such an approach would offer content provider support functions including user profiling and e-commerce and e-business management.